GWB

I had not gone out for a long, long walk in over a month. I could feel it, too, almost as soon as I started walking. My legs felt creaky. The journey turned out to be epic. I made it up onto the walkway of the George Washington Bridge for my first time ever. I went up to see something I guess I’ll never be able to see again: An unobstructed view of the Hudson River from up there. On account of the suicides that plague that bridge it’s been decided that a fence will be set up across the entire span. They did this on the Queensboro years ago, making the previously open walkway feel like a cage. I don’t think they closed the walkway on the Queensboro for the time it took to install it. The south GWB walkway will be closed completely for at least three months, while the path on the north side will be open. I have driven over that bridge a number of times but I’d never attempted the walkway, this even though I used to live right across the street from the entrance. But that was a long time ago, before it ever crossed my radar that walking over the city’s bridges was a thing to do.

It seemed pretty lightly populated up there but still, the GWB path is dangerous on account of all the bikes. With an available path on the north side of the bridge you’d think they might just route all bikes to one side and pedestrians to the other, as they did on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco when I was there years ago. On Saturday I came damn close to getting mowed down by three bikes. I guess it would have been my fault if it happened but given the mental handicap I momentarily experienced it would not have been like I was willfully negligent. I was looking over the railing at the river far below. This made me nauseous, and dizzy. I involuntarily backed away from the railing, feeling dizzy enough to stumble or even fall down. Next thing I knew three people were screaming at me and I felt myself bracing for impact. I never saw their faces. Amazingly there were no obscenities. I wonder if they thought I was suicidal…

The bridge walkway felt open and airy after you get past the initial twisty-turny narrow part. Photography is allowed, unlike on the RFK/Triborough. The suicidalists are also supplied with resources on the GWB not available on other bridges such as the RFK/Triborough. The GWB actually has working telephones that connect to a live suicide prevention counselor. No such phones exist on the RFK/Triborough despite the former presence of a sign saying that a LIFENET phone could be found up ahead. That sign was gone a couple of months ago, when last I made it up on that bridge.

The walkway on the GWB contains one sign after another imploring people not to jump. Seeing these signs the way a distressed and despondent person might see them I found that the presence of these signs gave the walk up there the feeling of some kind of graduation ceremony. I saw the signs as cynical entertainment and morbid affirmation for those who come truly driven to jump. One sign said “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” I saw that and thought You can’t grow anything on rocks.

It is an excellent view from up there. I am no sucker for beautiful views but on that basis I think it was worth the trip.

I walked past the apartment building I used to live in on Cabrini Boulevard. A few years ago, when I had the paid subscription to ancestry.com, I used one of the weirder features of that site which lets you enter a street address to see who lived there in the past. It’s a hit or miss resource but sometimes it can produce a surprisingly complete dossier of former residents of a house or an apartment. When I looked up the place on Cabrini it appeared that one of my roommates from over 25 years ago still lived in that apartment. I thought about ringing his doorbell on Saturday and see if he was still there and if remembered me, but I did not.

From the GWB I walked up to the Bronx, checking in on the other apartment I lived in at Broadway and 216th Street. That’s Inwood. The building looked the same but now it has a liquor store on the ground floor. That would have been convenient. Hah. There are also giant billboards for vodka and Hennessey on the wall outside my former apartment. I have no fond memories of that particular apartment or the area. I went up there just to see what I might still remember, and because I’m not likely to be in that area again anytime soon. Even as I stood outside the building all I could think was that I did not even care to see this place. The place on Cabrini had more appeal to me on account of the fun memories I had sticking my head out the window and interacting with people stuck in traffic down below.

I just realized I still remember my roommate’s phone number. What a strange thing to keep in the brain. I just looked it up, and THERE HE IS. Haha. I remember calling that number a lot and using it as my own for a couple of months until I got my own phone. The answering machine was constantly clogged with angry calls from student loan debt collectors. They were calling for that roommate, not me.

Some years ago I got into a correspondence with someone who introduced herself by saying that she thought she was living in my old apartment on Broadway at 216th Street. She was not in my former place but she was pretty close, living in the apartment right next door. But it was an interesting and random correspondence. I have pictures on my web site of that old apartment, with the street address. She looked up the address on a search engine and found me that way.

I remembered more than I thought I would of Inwood and Washington Heights, from big things to subtleties such as the slight curve in the road at Broadway and 211th Street. That bend in the road was my daily comma when I walked to or from the 207th Street A train station.

One thing there was none of when I lived up there was a Starbucks. Actually I don’t think there were any Starbuckses in NYC in 1992. But aside from a McDonald’s and maybe a C-Town I do not think there were any chain outlets to speak of in Inwood or Washington heights. That’s changed. I read once that you could have bought a one or two bedroom condo in Inwood for about thirty or forty thousand dollars in the early 1990s. Today those units would go for 15 times that if not more.

Oh but the real surprise (zipping back to WH) was the GWB Bus Station. I never entered the place when I lived there. At the time it had a reputation for being a shit house of derelicts and creeps, even worse than the Port Authority. The most I experienced of that scene was one time when I walked past outside. Someone trailed me for two blocks asking for money. I said nothing to him. This upset him. He repeatedly said “Don’t ignore me. Don’t just ignore me. Don’t do that!” He seemed genuinely offended and hurt by my silent treatment.

I honestly don’t know if the GWB bus station was as nasty as I had heard but today the place is squeaky clean and utterly spotless. If I ever need to take a bus anywhere (I hope I don’t) I’ll keep the GWB station in mind. Anything would be better than the dungeon of the Port Authority but the GWB is positively respectable. It’s also quite a bit smaller than I expected.

When exiting the 175th Street A train station on Saturday I remembered a time I came back to New York after being out of town for a few days. It was the 4th of July weekend in 1992. I went to Philadelphia to see a friend from college. As I exited the subway station I noticed that the street and sidewalks were covered by a blanket of shattered glass and general garbage. The windshields for some of the parked cars were smashed to smithereens. I noticed that for some reason a lot of blankets and sheets were hanging out of some apartment windows. I would later interpret these sheets as a sign of surrender.

I saw all this and thought there must have been one hell of a party for this Independence Day. I got home, turned on the radio, and learned there had been riots while I was gone. Big league riots. These were in response to the police shooting of Jose Garcia. This was not long after the Rodney King riots in LA, and the vapors of anger from those events fueled what happened in New York. It was scary shit. I stood in my apartment, which looked right out at the GWB, and saw police officers warming up for combat with a bunch of protesters who threatened to take over the bridge and shut it down. The cops were swinging their billy clubs like baseball bats, preparing to beat the snot out of anyone who came near them.

If my memory is correct the protesters never actually made it to the bridge.

One sparklingly vivid memory of that apartment was from the first room I stayed in. I was in a room across the hall for maybe 2 months before moving to the room with the bridge-facing window. Through one of the windows in that room I could see directly into a room in the building next door. It appeared to be a laundry sweat shop. Any time I looked there were 6 or 7 women doing laundry, seemingly 24 hours a day. I wish I got pictures of that, and of the police officers doing their warmups. Never enough pictures.

I remember being in that room when word came across the radio that Mikhail Gorbachev had “resigned”. I did not know more than any common person about Communism and the Soviet Union but when I heard the radio say he had “resigned” I thought “That doesn’t sound right.” It struck me as a sanitized announcement. Somewhere around here (or in storage) I still have the New York Times from the next day. The headline was something like “GORBACHEV STEPS DOWN, ENDING COMMUNISM’S 74-YEAR REIGN.” My dad, probably borrowing the line from talk radio, said that Communism was the biggest hoax of the 20th century.

I called my mother after I learned that Washington Heights was under siege. She had not heard about it either but, coincidentally, right when she picked up the phone a story about Washington Heights aired on the national nightly TV news, which she always watched. I did not have a television at the time so she relayed to me what they were saying, adding that it looked pretty damn scary. I gave her play by play of what was happening outside my window, with the cops swinging their batons and sirens screaming everywhere. In the midst of that I saw a well-dressed man with an attaché case scurrying about on 178th Street, looking busy and oblivious to all things. He was awesome. My mother laughed at my description of him.

If I never went anywhere but the supermarket in Washington Heights it was on account of the area’s reputation as a dangerous area. In Inwood I never went any place because there was nothing there. There was a bar across the street called Bakersfield but I did not go to bars back then. I remember going to a diner somewhere near 207th Street. Once I ordered a cheeseburger and for whatever reason I barely ate any of it. The waiter did not say anything but his heaping scorn at my wastefulness was palpable. Ah, memories. I also remember shopping for housewares and such at a hardware shop called DICK’S. Text on the shopping bags from that store read “I LOVE TO SHOP AT DICK’S.”

Yesterday I spotted a number of pubs and such that I never noticed when I lived up there. I ate at a diner that looked like a place from the 1980s. It reminded me of Valdosta, where my dad lived for a couple of years when I was in grade school. Dad memorably declared Valdosta to be an “armpit of humanity,” a verdict which later evolved into an “asshole of humanity.” I don’t remember why he had to live there when he did but I think his opinions about the town were shaped in large part by being assigned there involuntarily.

I got altogether lost in Fort Tryon Park, or as lost as one can get in a place like that. At one point I thought I was at 200th Street but don’t think I was even at 190th. I remember thinking that if I could find Indian Road then I would know where I was. It was lost on me that Indian Road is not near Fort Tryon Park but at the edge of Inwood Hill Park, that place of my salad days where I rolled around in the grass playing with bullets I found in the dirt. That’s also where I discovered the caves of Manhattan, which at the time were inhabited by Santaria practitioners.

I rediscovered Overlook Terrace. I discovered that heavenly sounding street one if the times I went up to Don Garvelmann’s place. I have to have passed his old apartment building on Fort Washington Avenue but I would have no memory of which one it was. I think I went to his place 3 or 4 times. He died there. My understanding of things was that he was not found for what appeared to be several days. I thought of that years later when someone at a bar shared the tale of an elderly man who dropped dead in the apartment upstairs from him. It was a hot summer and the dude’s body melted. Flesh came dripping down into this person’s friend’s apartment.

Ah, that reminds me… In the context of hearing that the GWB walkway would be closed for 3 months I caught a bit of wisdom that was lost on me. I believed the conventional wisdom that jumping off a high bridge into the water below was the closest thing to a painless death as one could ask for. The spine snaps (assuming you land right) and death is instantaneous. Right? Wrong. In fact it is possibly the most painful way to die. You don’t die instantly. Your spine snaps but your brain survives, unable to tell your body what to do. It’s like you are being electrocuted but that’s not what kills you. You drown because you can’t move your arms or legs. The only worse way to go would be crucifixion. That takes 3 days for you to die as your lungs collapse and you finally suffocate on your own phlegm.

Nice thought…